The Wright Show

Reid's new book, Blitzscaling ... How Reid created LinkedIn ... Why some companies must grow fast or die ... Is success in Silicon Valley more about talent or luck? ... Reid recalls the early days of PayPal ... When and how to fire employees ... Reid's unusual journey to Silicon Valley ... What does a conscientious corporation look like? ...

Was last week’s batch of court filings good news for Trump? (Hint: No.) ... Marcy: Discussions over a Moscow Trump Tower lasted a suspiciously long time ... What if the Trump Organization is indicted? What would that mean for Trump? ... Possible dimensions of a Trump-Russia quid pro quo ... The Trump campaign, Cambridge Analytica, the DNC hacks, and other dots to connect ... Will forthcoming evidence implicate Trump himself? ... What lies ahead for Julian Assange? ... Is a big Mueller reveal coming soon? ...

Father Michael's 22 years as a Carthusian Monk ... The contemplative tradition in Christianity ... How Zen captivated Father Michael ... Do Buddhist and Hindu mystics experience the same thing? ... Zen's influence on Father Michael’s theology ... God, creation, and evolution ... What insights does Christianity add to Buddhism? ... Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's influence on Father Michael ...

What evolutionary psychology says about men and women ... Bob: Evolutionary psychology isn’t inherently right wing ... The Kavanaugh hearings ... Diana's critique of #MeToo ... When men misread women’s social signals ... Have some evolutionary psychologists moved to the right? ... Diana: Women should be taught the art of rebuffing men ...

Sabine's new book, Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray ... Sabine: There’s no reason to think the four fundamental forces can be unified ... What "beauty" means to a physicist ... The weirdness of the Higgs Boson ... Must there be an explanation for the fundamental forces? ... Sabine: Multiverse theory isn't science ... What Sabine wants physicists to be doing instead of chasing beauty ...

What’s the real reason Trump is appeasing Mohammad bin Salman? ... Mickey: The establishment keeps Trump’s authoritarian tendencies in check ... Why Congress hasn’t given Trump his border wall ... Media tribalism and Max Boot’s miracle conversion ... Which Democratic presidential candidates does the GOP fear? ... Give Trump some credit for illuminating Middle American despair ...

The prescience of theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin ... Teilhard's synthesizing of the "above" and the "ahead" ... John: The creation of humans is not the universe's climax ... John: God is "not yet" ... Science and faith as different layers of explanation ... Searching for God in a scientific age ... Why John rejects perennialism ... Questions from the live audience ...

Kate's book, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny ... Strangulation and other forms of male social control ... Defining sexism and patriarchy, with reference to The Giving Tree ... Is it sexist to believe in inherent psychological differences between men and women? ... Looking back at the 2016 election through the lens of misogyny ... When Jordan Peterson threatened to sue Kate for libel ... How political polarization complicates the discussion of gender issues ...

Explaining “compatibilism,” the view that there’s no conflict between free will and determinism ... Without free will, what happens to moral responsibility? ... Eddy tells Bob he errs in saying determinism means events are "inevitable" ... Free will is hard to imagine, but not nonsensical ... Why most philosophers today are compatibilists ... Bob: Compatibilists are just playing word games ... Were prisoners destined from birth to wind up in prison? ... Waiting for the "Einstein of consciousness" ...

Tim's new book, The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age ... Tim: We're approaching a Standard Oil–like consolidation in tech ... Some subtle negative effects of monopoly ... Type in "batteries" on Amazon, and the first result is batteries made by Amazon ... Tim critiques Robert Bork's famous critique of antitrust law ... Why Bob is worried about monopoly in artificial intelligence ... Mark Zuckerberg as the "bad king" of tech ... How Google and Amazon might be broken up ...

Sarah and Mark on election surprises ... How the GOP increased its Senate margin ... White evangelicals' transactional relationship with Trump ... How Kavanaugh and the caravan affected the election ... Should Dems run progressive rockstars or boring moderates? ... Why governors matter ... What should the Dem House do? Hold hearings! ... With Sessions forced out, could Mueller's report be shelved? ...

Hugo reports from Brazil on the election Jair Bolsonaro, who has drawn comparisons to Trump ... The Brazilian right's campaign to discredit the left as corrupt ... Why did the Workers' Party nominate Lula, the jailed ex-president? ... Is Bolsonaro a fascist? ... What Hugo fears from Bolsonaro's rule ... Why an improving economy didn't help the incumbent leftist party ... Hugo: Bolsonaro is worse than Trump ...

The research on memory that won Eric the Nobel Prize ... The difference between normal memory loss and Alzheimer's ... Eric's new book, The Disordered Mind ... Eric's breakthrough study of marine snails with giant nerve cells ... What it's like to win the Nobel Prize ... Eric's childhood escape from Nazi-ruled Vienna to America ... Why Vienna was a center of intellectual ferment in the early 20th century ...

Why Bob K. calls himself a "liberal realist," not a neoconservative ... Bob K.'s new book on foreign policy, The Jungle Grows Back ... Did America's interventions in the Middle East lead to Trump? ... Could the US have effectuated a better outcome in Syria? ... Bob K.: "There is no such thing as justice in the international system" ... What should US strategy be toward China? ...

Amy's self-help book, Unf*ckology ... Amy’s path from “the cooties girl” to advice columnist ... Impersonating your way to the real you ... How to overcome fear and anxiety ... Why shame is neither good nor bad ... Amy: Be authentic to your values, not to your self ... The wrong way to get people to change ...